Smallness

This is a minor post, so it doesn't get a clever (to my mind, at least) name.

The Caves of Steel, the first of Asimov's Robot series, is set significantly closer in time period than Foundation (a few millenia). By this point, animosity has grown between the Spacers and those who live all their lives on Earth.

There is also a great deal of anger toward robots, which are taking over peoples' jobs.

Elijah is an investigator who has been assigned to the murder of a Spacer; a scientist. His partner, as dictated by the Spacers, is R. Daneel Olivaw; the murdered scientist's greatest creation; "R." standing for Robot.

Interestingly, this book seems to deal with overpopulation (here comes the reason for my post). A global population of eight billion strains the available living space on Earth. That's right only eight billion; that's just 1.2 billion more than today's population. A little research, however, shows that the world's population had just his 3 billion in 1960, several years after this book was written. Asimov must really have thought that a 166% increase would have been disasterous.

He probably never imagined that we are now projected to hit 9 billion by 2050; several years before he predicted we would hit 8 billion.

Although, Wikipedia claims that the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that we'll hit 7 billion in July of 2012. 2012. It's going to cause the end of the world over the course of five months; I'm calling it right now.

On the topic of the book, this older copy has the worst image of a robot that I could possibly imagine. It's hilariously impossible.

http://www.amazon.com/Robot-Novels-Caves-Steel-Naked/dp/B000PC46DU

Look at it! (That naked bit refers to The Naked Sun, which is also in this copy of the book.)